Defense

The Military Industrial Complex is a term coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to describe the web of policies and monetary relationships between legislators, national armed forces, and the military industrial base. The articles in this category address the relationship between our legislators and the lucrative defense contract industry.

Sherwood Ross: Whatever Manning has done, if anything, the Pentagon has no right to reduce him to a vegetative state. Yet that is what it is doing, using methods similar to those for punishing dissidents under Stalin.

Norman Solomon: And so, the secretary of state condemns awful Iran, invoking “our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it and the principles that ground it.” But don’t hold your breath for any such condemnation of, say, Saudi Arabia — surely an “awful” government that “routinely violates the rights of its people.”

Ivan Eland: Missile defense is an expensive relic of the Cold War, which the U.S. can no longer afford given its huge budget deficits and high debt levels. Keeping the program alive are Republicans who want to preserve this white elephant to realize the grandiose “Star Wars” dream of their hero, Ronald Reagan.

David Greenberg: Eisenhower’s speech itself has come to be romanticized all out of proportion to its merit, and the reasonableness of straightforward critiques of Pentagon spending cannot account for the mad embrace of Eisenhower in recent decades by anti-war leftists and so-called realists.

David Swanson: A poll last spring found that 85% of Kandaharis consider the Taliban “our Afghan brothers.” The poll was commissioned by the Pentagon. The same poll found that 94% favored peace negotiations, not war. So, out of the goodness of our racist hearts, we brought them more war.

Brent Budowsky: There should be no misunderstanding about this: If the START Treaty becomes the next weapon of aggressive partisan warfare, it would demoralize America’s allies and embolden America’s enemies.

LGBT Rights

Irene Monroe: Long before June officially became Gay Pride Month, and October “Coming Out Month” for the LGBTQ community, Halloween was unofficially our yearly celebrated “holiday,” dating as far back at the 1970s when it was a massive annual street party in San Francisco’s Castro district.

The Middle East

Richard Greeman: Anti-government demonstrations spread across Morocco after social media spread the story of Mousine Fikri, a fishmonger crushed to death inside a garbage truck as he tried to block the destruction of a truckload of his fish confiscated by police.